msn: removed buddies still appear in buddy list

[duckgrindrr]

I have removed many contacts from my msn account (via varying methods: through bitlbee, hotmail.com, windows live messenger, pidgin) but they keep showing up in 'blist all' and the total buddy count.

[anonymous]

Yes, I can confirm this. According to blist all I´ve some 50+ buddies on MSN. If I create a new control channel for MSN I get two friends in the channel (both online and offline). If I verify this on the hotmail website I see that I've in fact 4 buddies and that's the only correct answer.

And even more strange: if I want to remove some buddies from the buddy list, bitlbee refuses to do so because the buddy 'is not found'.

So bitlbee knows somehow that certain buddies on the list are non-existant but nevertheless keeps showing them, on the other hand the control channel does not recognize buddies while they're in fact real buddies.

[siberion@…]

This may not be relevant for much longer due to the merge of MSN and Skype (I'm not sure how infrastructure will be affected though), but I have also been plagued by this problem for a long time and decided to delve into the source to do some debugging today.

I found that spam contacts as well as deleted contacts are reported by the ADL message (and they don't have any attributes distinguishing them from desired contacts), however, when the addressbook is queried for additional information about buddies (role, etc), the MSN server only reports back "true" contacts and skips deleted contacts.

Perhaps Bitlbee should simply delete contacts which are not "confirmed" by the addressbook query, or flag them to be hidden from listings if they are in some way required by the protocol.

I should note that I'm using the "add_private" setting in order to be able to reply to a message on the off-chance that it is legitimate, but according to the documentation they shouldn't remain in my contacts, which they do (no, I didn't accidentally add 50 obvious spam accounts).

[wilmer]

I'm pretty sure I know what's the problem. It appeared when I upgraded to MSNP9 in 2010. All contacts get added to the internal contact list, even the ones that aren't on the "forward list" (your actual contact list instead of the full list of handles that are allowed, blocked, on your contact list, etc.). This is necessary to finish logging in properly but the non-contact ones should be hidden somehow.

Since MSNP is likely going to die soon and since the contacts will never show up online I've never cared enough to change this.

[dx]

Closing because the MSN plugin was removed in 7ec2ce8fd7d30a536823ef9e08a3dad80ce76d4e